There are numerous systems disclosed in the prior art, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,599,493 and 4,797,911, for automatically dialing telephone numbers and connecting an agent, usually from a pool of agents, to the call when the called party answers. These systems, known as predictive dialers, are designed to minimize the amount of time an agent spends dialing telephone numbers and waiting for answers and thereby maximize the amount of time the agent spends talking with the called party and transacting business. Some predictive dialers are relatively simple systems that do little more than dial a number and connect an agent to the call when the call is answered.
More advanced predictive dialers, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,327,490 employ call-pacing algorithms that use call session statistics gathered by the telephone system to predict when a telephone call will end and, in anticipation of the agent hanging up, initiate a new telephone call. The teachings of U.S. Pat. No. 5,327,490 are hereby incorporated by reference into the present disclosure. In the ideal situation, the new outgoing telephone call will be answered just as a previous telephone call terminates, thereby eliminating idle time for the telephone agents.
The prior art telephone predictive dialing systems, however, were limited in that a supervisor of a pool of telephone agents was unable to set a desired target value for any of the operating parameters of the predictive dialing systems. In the prior art systems, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,327,490, the supervisor could exercise throttle-like control to speed up or slow down the rate at which the predictive dialer placed outbound calls. If the supervisor noted that an unacceptably high percentage of the telephone agents were idle, the supervisor had the ability to increase the rate at which outbound calls were placed. Conversely, if all of the agents were constantly busy and customers were being placed on hold for long periods by the predictive dialer system, the supervisor could decrease the rate at which outbound calls were placed by increasing the length of the Call Pacing Delay. However, in the prior art systems, the supervisor was limited to making relative adjustments to the Call Pacing Delay (i.e., faster or slower) but could not establish an absolute value (or goal) for any of the call parameters.
Accordingly, a need exists in the art for a goal-based automated pacing system which allows a supervisor to set a target value for a particular telephone call parameter, such as agent utilization, drop rate, or hold time.
A further need exists in the art for such a system which will hold the selected telephone call parameter relatively constant while the independent variables of the system, such as the number of operators, the answer rate and agent call time, fluctuate.